A few days back, on the 26th of January, I was at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. The occasion was the launch of Creative Commons, India (http://cc-india.org/) on the sidelines of Techfest 2007. It was indeed an auspicious moment since on this day 57 years ago India's constitution was promulgated, and this fact was noted by the Dr. Ashok Misra, Director of IIT Bombay during his speech. However most of what followed was not so laudable.

It all started with Shishir Kumar Jha's introduction of Dr. Misra as someone who held six patents among a list of numerous achievements. Though the patents apparently had nothing to do with software, I could not help feeling uncomfortable at the mention of this fact. The hypocrisy was highlighted when Dr. Misra went on to praise Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose for his work on radio and microwave; and how Guglielmo Marconi took advantage of Bose's non-patented work to file a patent for himself three years later. God knows what Dr. Ashok Misra was thinking while filing those six patents that he so proudly holds.

This was followed by the customary GPL and FSF bashing.

Just consider this: Joichi Ito, the CEO of Creative Commons, and a board member of the Mozilla Foundation, Open Source Initiative, ICANN and Technorati telling the gathering how the GPL and Free Software Movement wanted 'absolute' freedom which is equivalent to copyright-less public domain works.

Then we had Dr. D.B. Phatak of KReSIT, IIT Bombay. The proverbial 'BSD premi' Dr. Phatak started of by proclaiming his love for the BSD license and dislike for the GPL. I can not fathom one thing. If I have to say 'I love you' to someone, is it an absolute necessity to say 'I hate you' to someone else? I have never heard RMS start a speech in such fashion, and neither have I ever heard Bruce Perens express such opinions about the Free Software Movement. On the contrary Perens belongs to that group of people who think the Linux kernel should adopt GPLv3 once it is finalised.

Dr. Phatak for all his liking for the BSD school of thought and how it is so freedom-friendly gave his entire presentation on Windows Media Player on a Windows machine.

The silver lining in this entire sham was Lawrence Liang, the legal lead of CC, India. His talk was the last and the most lively. An Indian of Chinese origin, he came across as a really humble, happy go lucky fellow, who would rather sit on the stairs and smoke away than get involved in all sorts of sophisticated mud slinging. I also got an autographed CC-India poster from him!